Friday, December 5, 2014

A Ride in the Reconstruction Zone, Part 4

From the October 2011 E-Block.***It turns out this will be our last item in the series on the writings of R. J. Rushdoony; although a monster of a book, Institutes of Biblical law
(IBL) turned out to be a much less demanding read than his prior works
we evaluated, and I was able to finish all of it (save some 100 pages
written by Gary North, which I consider outside our scope).

As before, though, the major reservation about what Rushdoony
offers is not what he says, but what he does not say. IBL is a
comprehensive and overall worthy evaluation of the Ten Commandments and
their meaning, followed by a few chapters of commentary; in all of this I
found very little disagreeable or in detectable error within my
purview. But as before, Rushdoony says little to nothing about to what
extent, and in what way, the law of the OT ought to be applied to today.
I have seen Rushdoony accused by atheists of wanting to re-institute
stoning as a punishment. Though Rushdoony does support capital
punishment, I saw no direct statement of the means to be used in IBL,
but I can see why someone might argue such a thing of Rushdoony: His
adamance about imposing Biblical law does not, where I have found so far
(obviously, he may do so in yet some other work not available to me),
doesn't often take the step of explaining depth and mode of application,
and sometimes leaves it unclear what he supposes application ought to
be.

One of the few cases where Rushdoony is explicit on such matters
is in regards to such things as the Sabbath observance and various forms
of dress (Num. 15:38), which he sees as "superseded by the signs of the
new covenant" like baptism and circumcision. But this is the exception
rather than the rule. There are several cases where Rushdoony compares
modern judicial malpractice to Biblical law, obviously (and often
rightly) criticizing the former for its inadequacies, but he never
explicitly states (at least not in IBL) something like, "The modern
judicial system needs to adopt this biblical law to this or that
extent." Given Rushdoony's boldness otherwise, I cannot help but ask why
not.

The closest we come to a specific program is this: "The education
which breeds Amalekites [Rushdoony's designation for enemies of God in
this part of the book] must be replaced with Christian education....The
state must become Christian and apply Biblical law to every area of
life, and apply the full measure of God's law. The permissive family
must give way to the Christian family." [323] It's bold, it's broad, and
it's thoroughly lacking in specifics.

I need not make much of places where Rushdoony and I disagree
theologically or exegetically. I find his treatments and views on
matters like Calvinism, tithing, and a few other points to be wrong, but
I could say the same of any other writer in terms of finding things to
disagree with. Perhaps his oddest arguments are his attempts to link
profanity (even when it does not mention God) to Biblical prohibitions
against swearing (in the sense of oaths -- 109); and his attempts to
argue that the prohibition on tattoos applies as well today (223); his
argument that the law against Lev. 19:19 forbids the production of
modern genetic hybrids because hybrids are sterile and cannot reproduce
(255 -- and later says that hybridization leads to "futile
experimentation, such as organ transplants" [!]-- 262 ). In these
Rushdoony goes much farther than the texts and their contexts allow. I
also find to be strained Rushdoony's argument that the Deuteronomic
covenant "circumscribes all men without exception" [655] and is in some
way continued in the New Testament covenant, though this is more of a
legalist technicality if one recognizes that principles inherent in the
law will be a basis for judgement anyway; it need not be doubted that
disobedience will still lead to judgment, as he says further.

That said, Rushdoony also offers a number of judicious insights,
and makes it quite clear that he thinks that while certain details of OT
law are not applicable to our times, it is the principles that matter
today -- a position we agree with [293; and, 301, where Rushdoony
discusses the dietary laws and deems them applicable not in detail, but
in principle; though he adheres to a questionable view that the laws had
some relevance to health]. So arguably the above oddities are cases in
which he took false steps regarding what were details and what were
principles. That being so I turn now to other criticisms from other
sources.

One reader asked me to be particularly on the lookout for any
place where Rushdoony implied that Christians were bound to pursue holy
war, as it were, against the heathen. Up til now I found nothing of the
sort, but at IBL 93 there is an expression that comes tantalizingly (if
again, incompletely) close. Speaking of Israel's war against Canaan,
Rushdoony remarks: "In brief, every law-order is a state of war against
the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare....Law is a
state of war." In between the ellipsis he makes clear that penalties are
made in accord with severity of an offense. But in light of his
declarations concerning Christians asserting Jesus' Lordship over all
creation, the reader may rightly wonder how far Rushdoony supposes this
should go. Are we called to be Crusaders? Is it the responsibility of
Christians to get themselves into public office, impose Biblical law,
invade foreign countries that are not Christian and impose the same rule
there? Rushdoony and the Reconstruction movement have been accused of
this by critics I have encountered over the years, and while I have yet
to see explicit statements where they demand this (they may be apparent
in other writings!) I can see why someone might reach that conclusion.

Another such statement is found at IBL 308. Rushdoony uses the
image of the Amalekites to illustrate evil and disorder in the world,
and says, "...the covenant people must wage war against the enemies of
God, because this war is unto death. The deliberate, refined, and
obscene violence of the anti-God forces permits no quarter...this
warfare must continue until the Amalekites of the world are blotted out,
until God's law-order prevails and His justice reigns." A little later
Rushdoony also makes it clear that evangelism is part of this program.
[321] But does he mean the war imagery literally? if so, to what extent?
It is not made clear.

So now for a closing commentary, which reflects one significant
purpose of this examination. One of the things I was on the lookout for
was what was related in a rather heated blog entry by a Skeptic, in
which it became clear that the lack of clarity I noted was indeed being
taken, in many cases, to enable an interpretation beyond what was
explicitly said. Some of the more offensive quotes offered were in
sources not available to me, and so could not be checked. Others were
indeed found in the sources, such as one in IBL: “"inter-religious,
inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go
against the very community which marriage is designed to establish." –
which a defender of Rushdoony tried to explain as being a
misunderstanding of how Rushdoony defined “race” (the explanation seemed
rather contrived, though). Others were not. For example, these quotes
were said to be from IBL, though no page number was given:

The move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually.

Lazy slaves were “an albatross that hung the South, that bled it.”

The University of Timbuktu never existed. The only thing that existed in Timbuktu was a small mud hut.

The false witness borne during World War II with respect
to Germany (i.e., the death camps) is especially notable and revealing….
the number of Jews who died after deportation is approximately
1,200,000 ....very many of these people died of epidemics.

This has become especially important now as apparently one of our
Republican Presidential candidates (Bachmann) has declared Rushdoony an
influence, and some of these quotes are being plastered all over the
Internet. I saw none of these above in reading IBL, however; indeed I
saw no chapter where they would have been contextually appropriate to
the contents. It also happens that IBL is searchable on Google Books,
and none of these quotes turned up. I have a past record of discovering
bogus quotes, so I am naturally suspicious when this sort of thing
happens. If critics wish to identify Rushdoony as a racist, or an
anti-Semite, they will have to provide more definitive verification than
this.

One quote that did turn up genuine, on page 203, was as follows:

The matriarchal society is thus decadent and broken...
matriarchal character of Negro life is due to the moral failure of Negro
men, their failure ...to provide authority. The same is true of
American Indian tribes which are also matriarchal.

The ellipsis, however, obscure some additional words, and the quote is not exact; for the sake of completeness:

The matriarchal society is thus the decadent and
broken. The strongly matriarchal character of Negro life is due to the
moral failure of Negro men, their failure to be responsible, to support
the family, or to provide authority. The same is true of American Indian
tribes which are also matriarchal today.

Are these the words of a racist? Perhaps, for they can easily be
envisioned as being so used. On the other hand, having read a good deal
of literature by African-American commentators, and having spoken to
many African-American men who were prison inmates, I have found similar
sentiments expressed therein about the failures of African-American men
to be responsible as well.

Just offhand, for example, Black Families
by Harriette Pipes McAdoo reports that findings matching those
described by Rushdoony were found in the words of serious scholars of
the late 60s and early 70s -- at the time when IBL was published (while
also noting disagreement on those findings). Were all those authors
racist? Or, could an scholarly author's poignant (if arguably incorrect)
social commentary be Rushdoony's racist claptrap? Conceivably, yes. But
by itself, that isn't clear.

Suffice to say that there are enough genuine quotes of this type
to be suspicious of Rushdoony, given how often he does not qualify or
explain himself, but also enough quotes of this sort that I did not
find that one may be suspicious of the critics as well. Were some of
these quotes just made up? Or do we have sanitized versions of IBL on
the market? Without more documentation, or reaching into sources not
available to me, it is impossible to say.

The critics are also adamant that other Reconstructionist authors
(like Gary North) offer even more explicit statements about such things
as re-instituting stoning. In later E-Blocks we may well investigate
these claims. In close for this series on Rushdoony, I can only say that
at the very least, his reticence indicates a warrant of due caution for
anyone who appeals to his work as authoritative.